Dune (2021 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dune, the 2021 film directed by Denis Villeneuve, began with a filmmaker who doubted he would ever get to make it. In September 2016 the Canadian director said, "a longstanding dream of mine is to adapt Dune, but it's a long process to get the rights, and I don't think I will succeed". He did succeed. The result arrived in 2021 as an American epic space opera, titled on screen as Dune: Part One. It adapts only part of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, and the production contracts covered that single film and nothing more. Why had so many filmmakers stumbled on this book before him? What did Villeneuve decide to keep, and what did he throw away? How do you make a desert planet feel physical to an audience? And what happens when an enormously expensive epic opens in the middle of a pandemic?

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• 2. Spice and Betrayal

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  Arrakis is a harsh desert planet, and it is the only source of a substance called spice. Spice sharpens vitality and awareness, and it also makes interstellar travel possible. It gives Spacing Guild Navigators the ability to guide starships across space instantaneously and safely. The story begins when the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV orders Duke Leto Atreides to replace Baron Vladimir Harkonnen as the fiefholder of Arrakis. The Emperor fears Leto's rising power. He secretly plots with House Harkonnen, aided by his Sardaukar troops, to destroy House Atreides. Leto distrusts the Emperor but weighs that danger against the prize of controlling Arrakis and allying with its mysterious natives, the Fremen.

  Lady Jessica, Leto's concubine, is an acolyte of the Bene Gesserit, a sisterhood whose members possess advanced physical and mental abilities. A breeding program lasting centuries had instructed her to bear a daughter. That daughter's son was meant to become the Kwisatz Haderach, a messianic superbeing with the prescience to guide humanity toward a better future. Jessica disobeyed and bore a son, Paul. Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck, the Suk doctor Wellington Yueh and the Mentat Thufir Hawat train him, and Jessica teaches him Bene Gesserit disciplines. Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Emperor's Truthsayer, tests Paul with a deadly gom jabbar to measure his humanity and impulse control. He passes.

  Arrakeen, the principal stronghold on the planet, is where House Atreides settles in. The Fremen revere Paul and Jessica, which she explains is the result of beliefs the Bene Gesserit planted on Arrakis centuries earlier. Leto negotiates with the Fremen chieftain Stilgar and meets Dr. Liet Kynes, a planetologist who lives among them. Kynes warns of the dangers of spice harvesting and of the giant sandworms that travel under the desert and make protective shields unwise. During a flight, the group rescues a stranded harvesting crew from a worm. Paul's exposure to the spice sets off intense premonitions.

  On Giedi Prime, meanwhile, Mohiam presses Baron Harkonnen to spare Paul and Jessica in his coup, and he duplicitously agrees. Yueh then betrays the Atreides and disables the shields of Arrakeen, letting the Harkonnens and Sardaukar pour in. He plans to trade the incapacitated Leto for his own wife, who is held prisoner by the Baron. Yueh also replaces one of Leto's teeth with a poison gas capsule. Leto releases the gas and kills himself and the Baron's Mentat, Piter De Vries, but the Baron survives. Paul and Jessica are dropped deep in the desert to die. A compassionate Yueh has left them a fremkit of supplies, and Jessica uses the Voice technique to overpower their captors. That night, surrounded by spice, Paul sees a bloody holy war fought across the universe in his name.

  Baron Harkonnen appoints his nephew Rabban to rule the planet and orders spice production restarted to recoup the cost of the invasion. Duncan and Kynes find Paul and Jessica, and Paul reveals a plan to marry one of the Emperor's daughters to prevent civil war. Sardaukar soldiers discover them. Duncan sacrifices himself so the others can escape, and the wounded Kynes lures a sandworm to devour herself and the soldiers. Deep in the desert, Paul and Jessica meet Stilgar's tribe, including Chani, the young woman from Paul's visions. A Fremen warrior named Jamis challenges Stilgar's leniency and calls for a duel to the death. Paul accepts and wins. Against Jessica's wishes, he joins the Fremen to pursue his father's goal of peace, and there the film stops, with the novel's second half still unfilmed.

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• 3. The Unfilmable Book

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  Since 1971, a succession of producers has held the film rights to Herbert's novel, and its sheer breadth earned it a reputation as unfilmable. Fans guarded the book so closely that any departure without strong justification risked damaging a film's standing.

  Alejandro Jodorowsky acquired the rights in the 1970s and planned a fourteen-hour adaptation. He never raised enough money, but the effort later became the subject of the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. David Lynch's 1984 film, produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis, was meant to run three hours and was cut to 137 minutes. It was poorly received, and Lynch ended up disowning it.

  In 1996 the producer Richard P. Rubinstein acquired the rights. The miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune, directed by John Harrison, aired on the Sci Fi Channel in 2000. It was a ratings hit and fared better than Lynch's film. Some reviewers still said it lacked a feature's spectacle and stayed so faithful that exposition weighed it down. Villeneuve's version would be the third screen adaptation.

  The success of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter film series improved the odds for another attempt. Both kept most of their key characters and plots while fitting a limited running time. In 2008 Paramount Pictures hired Peter Berg to direct. Berg left in October 2009, and Pierre Morel was hired in January 2010. Paramount cancelled the project in March 2011 after failing to reach key agreements, and the rights reverted to Rubinstein.

  Also in 2011, Mary Parent, a vice chair of worldwide production at Legendary Pictures, and her producer partner Cale Boyter acquired adaptation rights. Legendary obtained film and television rights in November 2016. Villeneuve was in talks with the studio by December, and Parent hired him after hearing him describe his vision. Her respect had grown from his obvious enthusiasm. He asked to finish Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) first, so he could take more time to develop Dune and co-write it himself. He signed on by January 2017, about a week after receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for Arrival. The appointment became official that February.

  Several collaborators from those two films returned. They included the editor Joe Walker, the production designer Patrice Vermette, the visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, the sound designer Theo Green, the sound editor Mark Mangini and the special effects supervisor Gerd Nefzer. Others dropped out before production began, among them the cinematographer Roger Deakins, who was replaced by Greig Fraser in December 2018. In April 2019, David J. Peterson, the creator of the languages for Game of Thrones, was confirmed as the film's constructed language developer.

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• 4. Rewriting Herbert

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  In March 2018, Villeneuve said his goal was to adapt the novel as two films, because he felt it was too large and complex for one. He secured a two-movie deal with Warner Bros. Pictures, in the same style as the two-part adaptation of Stephen King's It in 2017 and 2019.

  Eric Roth was hired to co-write the screenplay in April 2018. He had read the book as a child and held a neutral opinion of it, which he said gave him an "objective view of it". His 50-page treatment aimed at three groups of people: readers who loved the book, those who did not remember it or care for it, and those who had never encountered it.

  Villeneuve completed a first draft by May 2018. The producer Brian Herbert said the fourth draft, submitted in July, would cover the first half of the novel's events. Jon Spaihts joined as a co-writer in September. He said the team limited the Arab and Islamic influences found in the book, because he worried about overemphasizing them and felt the need to "invent more and borrow less". Roth later returned after finishing Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). He gave feedback after a screening and helped with rewrites before reshoots.

  Villeneuve chose not to draw on Lynch's film while writing, preferring to refer directly to the book. He called his reaction to Lynch's Dune "half-satisfied" and said he would make the film with a "different sensibility". He kept Jodorowsky's envisioned concepts out as well, since using them would feel "very presumptuous and arrogant". His love of the book, he said, kept earlier adaptations from intimidating him. He compared the work to archaeology, describing it as "going back in time and finding those images mixed with emotions, and bringing them back to life".

  Villeneuve called his screenplay "a coming-of-age story, but also a call for action for the youth". He pointed to the book's social commentary on capitalism and on the exploitation of natural resources such as oil. He wanted to recreate how it felt to read the novel as a teenager and to keep "the atmosphere and poetry... intact". Internal monologues and epigraphs were cut, and the "pseudo-antiquated" dialogue was simplified. The bond between Paul and Jessica became the main focus, and Villeneuve gave them a secret hand gesture language for silent communication. Political material was trimmed to keep the book's scale while concentrating on Paul's growth. The holographic filmbook videos that teach Paul about Arrakis come from the novel, and Villeneuve wanted them to show Paul's "appetite for learning".

  Baron Harkonnen, his court and the Mentats Thufir Hawat and Piter De Vries received less prominence, though enough was established for later films. Villeneuve wanted the Baron to be a complex antagonist rather than the caricature he felt the novel presented, and he drew on Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now (1979). He also changed some arcs of the female characters to give them more respect, since he saw femininity as a crucial theme. Rebecca Ferguson said this widened Lady Jessica's role as a soldier and a member of the Bene Gesserit. The studio labelled the role a "warrior priestess", in contrast to the joking label of "space nun" that Villeneuve felt the book implied.

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• 5. Casting Calls

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  For Paul Atreides, Villeneuve wanted an actor with "an old soul in the body of a teenager". He identified Timothée Chalamet as the ideal choice and later admitted he had no alternative in mind. Chalamet had auditioned for a role in Villeneuve's Prisoners (2013) and wanted to work with him. He travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to discuss the part, and he entered final negotiations in July 2018.

  Rebecca Ferguson began negotiating for Lady Jessica that September. She was at first dismissive, because the role felt close to Ilsa Faust, her character in Mission: Impossible, and she did not want to be typecast as a "strong female character". Villeneuve's ideas and a reading of the book changed her mind. She said she enjoyed the "simplicity of wanting to save something you have created and all of these shades". By January 2019 she had been cast.

  The casting director Francine Maisler gathered between 30 and 50 audition tapes for Villeneuve to choose from for secondary roles. Dave Bautista wanted to contact Villeneuve, an avid fan, but was surprised when the director called first with the offer of Glossu Rabban. Villeneuve wanted Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Harkonnen because he had found the actor intimidating. He contacted Charlotte Rampling personally for Mohiam, and she accepted because she enjoyed his work. Oscar Isaac reached out once he heard the film was in development and became Duke Leto, saying the role suited him physically. Zendaya auditioned for Chani alongside five other actresses, and Jenna Ortega also tried out. Zendaya won the part partly because her scenes with Chalamet were judged the best. Bautista, Skarsgård, Rampling, Isaac and Zendaya all joined in January 2019.

  The next month brought Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa and David Dastmalchian, cast as Stilgar, Gurney Halleck, Duncan Idaho and Piter De Vries. Villeneuve phoned Bardem directly. The actor was shocked, because he had wanted to play Stilgar, and he compared it to his love for Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Brolin joked that he pretended to read the script before accepting. Momoa received his casting call while snowboarding down a mountain and later confirmed his involvement on a Skype call. Dastmalchian took his call at home in Los Angeles and accepted without reading the script, trusting Villeneuve.

  Stephen McKinley Henderson joined in March 2019. Maisler chose him after admiring his work in New York theaters. For Dr. Yueh, she curated a list of the most talented Chinese actors, and after trouble reaching Chang Chen, the team contacted his manager in China. He accepted the role. Benjamin Clementine became the Herald of the Change because Maisler had enjoyed his performance in the Tiny Desk Concerts.

  Sharon Duncan-Brewster auditioned in London through the casting director Jina Jay, and she said she "exudes an intelligence and a power and an inner strength". Villeneuve selected her from Maisler's shortlist. Jon Spaihts had suggested changing the gender of Liet Kynes, and Villeneuve accepted at once, feeling that he did not need to follow every detail of the book to stay true to the character. Duncan-Brewster's casting was confirmed in April 2020.

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• 6. Built By Hand

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  Patrice Vermette, the production designer, wanted sets grounded in realism so audiences would believe the extraordinary elements. He used minimal set extensions and no greenscreens. He created a "visual bible" to keep set design consistent with the visual effects, and he re-read the novel, finding that it offers clues but remains "quite nonspecific". Early mood boards mixed Mesopotamian ziggurats, Egyptian references, World War II bunkers, Brazilian and Soviet brutalist architecture, minimalist megastructures and dams designed by Superstudio, and images of glaciers taking over mountains.

  The ornithopters were conceived by Villeneuve and the storyboard artist Sam Hudecki. Villeneuve wanted them "muscular", resembling a dragonfly and a helicopter while obeying basic laws of science. London propmakers built two functional models, 48 and 75 feet long, with working doors and interior cockpits. They weighed over 11 tons and needed an Antonov cargo plane to reach locations in Hungary and Jordan. Cranes made them fly.

  Many practical sets stood on the soundstages and backlots of Origo Film Studios in Budapest, serving as interiors for the three planets. For Caladan, Vermette sought a feeling of melancholia, modelled on autumn in his native Canada, which he saw as the end of one cycle or the start of another. He pictured dramatic coastal mountain ranges and Norwegian pines. The interiors drew on medieval Japanese aesthetics, especially Paul's training room with its screens and diffused lighting. Set decorator Richard Roberts supplied custom furniture, lighting and textiles produced in Denmark.

  The first sandworm design was judged "prehistoric", inspired by whales with baleen. Its skin texture came from tree bark and mud flats. Vermette noted that the Fremen almost treat the creature as a deity, which is why a mural shows it with sun coming out of its mouth. He called Arrakeen "the biggest residency ever built by humankind", a colonial response to exploiting spice. The city sits in a rock bowl to shield it from worms, its buildings are angled against high winds, and its walls are thickened to cool the interiors. Murals of Fremen history made it feel like a church. One practical set was a circular environmental lab dome 20 feet high, where Sardaukar soldiers descend from above. Its spokes were made of cloth that created the illusion of shadows, and sand was spread on the floor because Budapest was in its rainy season.

  The costume designers Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan created over 1000 looks for Arrakis, Caladan and Giedi Prime. Villeneuve wanted costumes grounded in history yet free of conventional science-fiction styling. West took her main inspiration from the Middle Ages, imagined as it might look in the future. She linked the Fremen to the French Resistance and the Sardaukar to the Nazis. She tied the Spacing Guild to the Avignon Papacy, the Bene Gesserit to tarot cards and chess pieces, and the Atreides to the Romanovs, whose simplicity she called regal. Harkonnen armor imitated a bug's shell, drawn from medieval drawings of insects, spiders, ants, praying mantises and lizards. Jessica's early dresses echoed Cristóbal Balenciaga, and her turmeric gown on arrival owed a debt to Middle Eastern clothing and paintings of women in North Africa.

  West and Jose Fernandez designed a stillsuit prototype at Ironhead Studios in Los Angeles. A factory was then set up at Origo Studios to make more suits within two weeks. More than 250 stillsuits were used during filming in Jordan. The designers built "micro-sandwiches" of acrylic fibers and porous cottons that absorbed moisture and kept the actors cool, with tubing running through them for flexibility. Zippers and buttons were left out because they were judged "archaic".

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• 7. Sand, Sound, and Score

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  Principal photography began on the 18th of March 2019 at Origo Film Studios in Budapest, with Greig Fraser as cinematographer. The film was shot for IMAX with an IMAX-certified Arri Alexa LF camera and a prototype Alexa Mini LF. Select scenes opened to a 1.90:1 aspect ratio on all IMAX screens and to 1.43:1 on select screens with dual-laser projection. The footage was transferred to 35mm film stock and scanned back to 4K for a more film-like look. Wadi Rum in Jordan doubled for Arrakis, and the Liwa Oasis in the United Arab Emirates served as another key backdrop across 11 days. Rock formations used as Fremen heat shelters were filmed in the Rub' al Khali desert, and Stadlandet in Norway stood in for Caladan. Filming wrapped on the 26th of July 2019.

  On the Budapest backlots, crews filmed practical explosions up to roughly five kilometers high for the Arrakeen invasion. Isaac filmed Duke Leto's death as his final scene, choosing to do it nude because he felt it resembled Christ's crucifixion. The bull's head in that scene was also his idea, which he saw as an "omen". Ornithopter interiors were shot on hilltops outside Budapest, using a 25-foot-high, 360-degree sand-colored ramp circling a large gimbal so Fraser could use natural sunlight. Tom Struthers, the stunt coordinator and second unit director, based Idaho's fighting style on Greek and Roman warfare and the Sardaukar's on Russian soldiers of World War II. Chalamet learned a sandwalking technique designed by the choreographer Benjamin Millepied.

  DNEG made 1,200 of the film's 1,700 visual effects shots. Paul Lambert used "sandscreens" in place of green backgrounds for Arrakis, matching the desert plates that would fill the frame. Caladan scenes used "grayscreens" and Salusa Secundus used bluescreens. Roughly 18 tons of sand and dust went into the shoot, and blowing sand came from a V8 engine with a fan on the back of a tractor. The team spent over a year working out how the sandworm should move, studying worms and snakes. The ripples it makes in the sand drew on visual cues from the shark in Jaws (1975). Gerd Nefzer buried a vibrating 8x8 foot steel plate under the sand to signal an approaching worm. The team considered rigged explosives to capture a worm breaking the surface, but rejected the idea as impractical in the Middle East. Instead they used the Houdini software to make sand behave like water.

  Lambert created the shimmering look of the Holtzman shields by combining past and future frames, after experimenting with filters on a sequence from Seven Samurai (1954). Blue marked bouncing objects and red marked penetrations. Villeneuve did not want the sound to seem like a studio product, so Mark Mangini and Theo Green took a "fake documentary realism" approach, recording natural sounds and reshaping them. They captured shifting sands in Death Valley with hydrophones.

  Hans Zimmer confirmed he would score Dune in March 2019. He turned down Christopher Nolan's request to score Tenet (2020), citing his love of the book. He avoided watching Lynch's film so that Toto's music would not influence him, and he spent a week in a Utah desert to bring its sounds into the score. He also used instruments atypical of a Western orchestra, some built for the soundtrack. Villeneuve suggested something "ancient and organic" for House Atreides, which became bagpipes. Zimmer found 30 bagpipe players around Edinburgh during the COVID-19 pandemic and recorded them in a church. For the first trailer, he supervised a 32-person choir over FaceTime for a cover of Pink Floyd's "Eclipse". They recorded in eight sessions of four singers each in Santa Monica while he conducted from home. The score earned a Grammy nomination.

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• 8. Verdict and Sequels

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  Dune was first scheduled for the 20th of November 2020, then moved to the 18th of December 2020, and then delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic to the 1st of October 2021. In late June 2021, Warner Bros. pushed the American date to the 22nd of October 2021, to avoid competing with No Time to Die. The film premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on the 3rd of September 2021. International release began on the 15th of September in markets including France and Germany.

  Like all Warner Bros. films of 2021, Dune also streamed on HBO Max for a month. Villeneuve and Legendary Pictures were among those who objected, and Villeneuve wrote in Variety about concerns over the film's finances and piracy. On the 17th of October the film leaked online. Two days earlier, Jason Momoa had tested positive for COVID-19 after the London premiere.

  The film grossed $411 million worldwide on a $165 million budget, with $109 million from the United States and Canada. It opened to $41 million in 4,125 theaters, beating projections of $30-35 million. Estimates of the break-even point varied widely. Vulture said the film needed $350-400 million, while Forbes said it needed around $500 million. On streaming, Samba TV reported that 3.9 million US households watched it within 30 days. On home media, it sold a combined 215,375 Blu-ray and DVD units in its first week.

  Metacritic gave Dune a weighted average of 74 out of 100 from 68 critics, and audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an "A minus ". Empire, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian each gave it five stars. Xan Brooks of The Guardian called it "the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse". Owen Gleiberman of Variety was more negative, finding that the spectacle disengaged him from the story. Others criticized the pacing and the abrupt ending. At the 94th Academy Awards the film won six awards and was nominated in four other categories.

  The film also drew sharp debate. Roxana Hadadi of Vulture criticized it for flattening the cultural and religious complexity of the book without casting Middle Eastern or North African actors. Serena Rasoul, founder of Muslim Casting, called the lack of such actors an "erasure" but did not call the film Orientalist. Haris Durrari, a Princeton history student, judged it Orientalist for reducing Arab influences to "exotic aesthetics".

  Villeneuve had feared that the HBO Max release might hurt the film's finances and cost him the sequel. Warner Bros. assured him it would be greenlit if the film did well. In October 2021 Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures officially greenlit Dune: Part Two, which premiered at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London on the 15th of February 2024. It reached cinemas on the 1st of March 2024. Legendary Television's spin-off series, announced in June 2019 as Dune: The Sisterhood and retitled Dune: Prophecy in November 2023, premiered on HBO on the 17th of November 2024 and was renewed for a second season that December. Villeneuve says the next film will conclude his trilogy. Dune: Part Three, based on Herbert's 1969 novel Dune Messiah, is scheduled for the 18th of December 2026, and Zimmer was already writing its music before Part Two opened.

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